SimFarm

Saturday, December 10, 2016

Platforms:

PC, Mac, FM Towns, PC-98

Publisher:

Maxis Software

Developer:

Leaping Lizard Software

Genres:

Strategy / Business Simulator

Release Date:

1993

Game Modes:

Singleplayer

SimFarm is a bit like SimCity in that you have to maintain the infrastructure of a system for it to prosper, but here you replace population growth with cabbage growth. Do a good job and eventually you can sell your harvested cabbage for a tidy sum, then use the proceeds to buy better equipment or increase your real-estate and grow more cabbage.

You can buy your own harvesters or rent them out, buy a few sheds and silos for storing your gear and crops respectively, clear your land of rocks, trees and other debris, and finally get to farming proper. There are actually a good variety of stuff you can plant, both fruits and vegetables, and they’re quite sensitive to the type of climate conditions you choose to settle in. The prices at which you can sell your stock shifts quite a bit, and if you get a poor harvest you won’t get much for it anyway.

Depending on the types of crops you’ll plant, you’ll eventually start having problems with pests, and unless you spray those suckers with some pesticide you won’t have much to sell. One way is to just click on the spray button, and another is to go into the crop’s timeline and schedule a spraying. Both are tedious. In fact the whole game can be a bit tedious, and never quite as addictive as its city-building cousin, try as it may. Even on the maximum speed setting, watching plants grow is only slightly more amusing than watching paint dry.